In short, she has made a sideline career for herself exhorting young women to "lean in" -- to compete and strive in the workforce with a no-holds-barred attitude. For some people, this implies that Sandberg believes women can get whatever they want if they just work harder and believe in themselves more -- that, somehow, the combination of ambition and confidence will melt away the barriers created by years of sexism in the workplace. They say that Sandberg has lived a charmed life, and doesn't give enough credit to the extent that sexism can hold women back, regardless of their attitude. The New York Times summarizes this criticism by saying:
[S]ome say her aim-high message is a bit out of tune. Everyone agrees she is wickedly smart. But she has also been lucky, and has had powerful mentors along the way.
This may just be a "some say" gloss on criticisms of Sandberg, but it's an unfortunately messy summary of her detractors. Luck, after all, is what too many women chalk up their success to, Sandberg has argued. Their male peers, in contrast, believe themselves to be "awesome" -- fully deserving of their success.
The problem with the way the Times framed Sandberg's success begins with the use of the word "but": She's smart, *but* she's lucky, as though this somehow trumps her smarts. Success comes from being smart *and* lucky. I searched through the past five years of New York Times archives to find other instances when luck had been employed to explain someone's success. I found an obituary for an inventor who had "marshaled luck, spunk and inventiveness to fashion an entrepreneurial career that included developing the first commercial frozen French fry"; a Russian billionaire-turned-alleged-criminal whose meteoric rise left you wondering whether it was a result of "genius, luck, ruthlessness, or connections"; and an inventor of medical devices who had luck "like all billionaires." The only two instances I saw of luck gaining a fuller explanatory power was once in the case of George Steinbrenner, whom the author thought quite lucky to have bought the Yankees just before the era of free agency, and Kristin Gillibrand, the senator of New York, of whom Al Sharpton is quoted as saying, "I think Gillibrand either has mystical powers or the best luck I have ever seen in politics." It's rather unfortunate that the one time the Times inadvertently discredited someone's success on account of luck, that someone was the woman known for telling women not to chalk their success up to luck.
Let it be clear: Sheryl Sandberg is no fool. She does not believe
that luck plays no role in women's achievements. In fact, she begins her
TED speech saying, "So for any of us in this room today, let's start
out by admitting we're lucky." Sandberg's message isn't that women can
get whatever they want merely by being more ambitious. Her message to
women -- privileged, highly-educated, "lucky" women -- is that once you
have all those things, you have to stop explaining away your success by
crediting luck or the beneficence of a mentor. It's not that
these things haven't contributed to success. It's that when you focus on
them, you implicitly understate your own abilities.